A small herb called Fritillaria delavayi may be the first example of a threatened plant evolving to blend into its surroundings
,” to test how easily camouflaged plants could be found. When volunteers were asked to identifyamong rocks and dirt, it took them longer to locate specimens with measurably less vibrant color.
“We’ve known that for thousands of years humans have shaped the way plants look through domestication, the way we breed plants for food,” Rubin adds. “This is a really great example of human-mediated selection in the wild, documenting a change and pretty convincingly relating that change to a human pressure, in this case harvesting.”
Jill Anderson, a biologist at the University of Georgia, sees the paper’s conclusion as a “tantalizing hypothesis,” but says for her to be convinced that it’s humans causing this camouflage, she’ll need to see further proof. “Certainly there might be other things contributing to this change—weather or elevation, or an herbivore they didn’t happen to see,” says Rubin. “But the relationship [between harvest pressure and color] was quite strong—the populations with strong harvest pressure had the closest match to the background.
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